There’s an interesting phenomenon called inattentional blindness, also known as expectation bias. It’s when we literally don’t see something right in front of us because we don’t expect to. This isn’t metaphorical, it’s well documented by science.

Maybe the most common example is car drivers hitting motorcyclists. Often, the driver turns directly into them and then insists, “They came out of nowhere,” or “I didn’t see them.”

It may sound like the excuse of an inattentive driver, but studies show most of these drivers are being truthful. If we don’t expect to see something — like a motorcycle in traffic — we’re much more likely to overlook it, even if it’s right there in our visual field. Not in a blind spot, not hidden, just invisible to our perception. Really.

How is that possible? Reality (capital R) contains far more information than our brains could ever process. The notion that Reality exceeds our perception isn’t just philosophical—it’s neurological fact. Even within the limited slice our senses can register, the brain filters relentlessly to keep us from being overwhelmed.

And one of the main filters is expectation. If we’re not used to seeing something, we often don’t. The brain dismisses it as irrelevant noise. That’s why drivers genuinely don’t see motorcyclists: they so rarely encounter them that the brain doesn’t expect to.

Wild, eh?

Tell me — have you ever found a four-leaf clover? Most people would probably say no. Have you ever gotten down on your hands and knees in a clover patch and looked for one? Most people again would probably say no. We glance at clover patches as we pass, see nothing, and conclude they’re rare.

Dr Andrew Weil, the world-famous alternative health doctor, once tested this. He had the same experience of most people, thinking they were rare and never finding any. But then he decided to start looking. He would get down on his hands and knees in clover patches and search for them. At first, he couldn’t find any even after searching for hours. But as he kept up the practice, first he started finding them every now and then, then he could find them fairly often, and eventually he got to the point where he could always find at least one rekatively quickly.

What changed? Did four-leaf clovers suddenly become more common? Did clovers mutate to please him? Did his desire summon them into being? Nothing so silly. It was expectation bias at work. His expectation changed. Early on, his brain filtered them out as improbable. As he persisted, each occasional success updated his mental filter. His brain began expecting to see them and therefore so he did.

He updated the filter on his brain, so to speak. Much slower than updating the filter in your browser ad-block list, but something of the same idea.

What’s the point? That reality (small r) is far more fluid than we like to think. There is an objective Reality, but since we can only experience our filtered version of it, there’s no single objective truth accessible to us. Your reality, quite literally, is not the same as mine.

Consider this before judging people or events, or assuming you see and know the full picture.

❦

David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Bluesky. 【Support @dbooster with Hive SBI】